My point is that giving cops the latitude that the escalation of force provides is like giving the CEO's 15 year old nephew the commit bit and letting him write safety critical software in non-MISRA C.

The core of my objection to police personnel calling non-police "civilians" is twofold:

* It lets police benefit from the competency halo projected by the military and their training when -in fact- most police get precious little training.

* It seeks to create a deep division between the police and the communities they serve. Police should be members of (and get to know) the communities that they police.

[0] It's important that cops be able to react with force to uncontrollable, imminently dangerous situations. However, I expect that those situations pretty much never actually happen. ;)

Why is that? I can understand if you think there's a practical problem with doing so (but would still lament that), but I think that ideally "regular cops" should absolutely be held up to that same standard. I mean, look... these people are literally given life-and-death responsibility over the general populace. They should be held to a ridiculously high standard.

It is a practical problem. The military has an extremely long institutional memory and has perfected the process of mental conditioning over hundreds of years, to the point where 18 year olds can be given the power to kill and dropped into situations with little to no supervision - and it generally doesn't result in an x-rated version of Lord of the Flies. The methods that the military uses to accomplish this would not work for police without a costly tear down and slow rebuild. The list of methods is far too long to list here, but they include a culture of self policing enabled by a meaningful shared experience (basic redefinition of family), and a mythology that requires a carefully managed narrative of history (Gen MacArthur's farewell address at West Point is full of examples).